A big lift

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda took home the top prize — the Palme d’Or for his film Manbiki Kazoku (Shoplifters) at the 71st Cannes Film Festival.

Kore-eda is only the second Asian Palme d’Or winner this millennium (after Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010). This is the seventh time that a director from Asia has bagged the coveted trophy.

Spike Lee’s engaging, feisty anti-racism period drama BlacKkKansman, the true story of an African-American police detective who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs in the 1970s, won the Grand Prix, while Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki’s neorealist Beirut street life tale Capharnaum earned the Jury Prize.

The Best Director prize went to Poland’s Pawel Pawlikowski for the wonderfully well-crafted black-and-white Cold War, a 1950s story of impossible love between a music composer and a gifted singer – two strong-willed individuals from dissimilar backgrounds drawn to each other amid disruptions caused by history.

Asian, Arab, and women filmmakers scored big at the closing ceremony of this year’s festival. —PTI